Tag: London Film Festival

Son of Saul recasts the Holocaust as Bruegelian nightmare

 

In Son of Saul, first-time director László Nemes gets us right up in the face of Saul Ausländer (poet-turned-actor Géza Röhrig).

Saul’s powerful features and dark eyes give him a sharp, watchful look. As a Hungarian Jew, and member of a Sonderkommando work unit at Auschwitz, it pays to be watchful.…

Youth captures some of the mixed magnificence of life

 

One of the few statements you can make about life as a whole is that it’s much of a muchness— and that it ends.

The counter-intuitively titled Youth sees two older gentlemen, a retired composer and Stravinsky pupil, Frank (Michael Caine), and still-working director (Harvey Keitel), Mick, both coming to terms with this while on holiday at a Swiss spa; a spa inhabited by red-robed Buddhist monks, a Middle Eastern woman in a hijab, a morbidly obese celebrity with a Karl Marx back tattoo and Maradona hair.…

Anomalisa is a truly individual film (which is ironic, considering)

 

How do you know you’ve found the right person? And how do you know they’ll stay that way? It’s this fundamental human question that forms the basis of Kaufman’s latest, Anomalisa.

Kaufman’s second film in the director’s chair follows Michael Stone, a highly successful but deeply insecure customer service guru, who experiences a reprieve from his ennui when, during a business trip to Cincinnati, he encounters Lisa, a perfectly ordinary, indeed unremarkable, call center employee, who is to him utterly unique.…

Bone Tomahawk is a brutal and welcome revisionist Western

 

In Bone Tomahawk, novelist turned filmmaker S. Craig Zahler takes an approach to the Western genre that is bright, dusty, and watered with blood — think The Searchers meet The Hills Have Eyes.

When a mysterious drifter (David Arquette) wanders into the idyllic settlement of Bright Hope, Chicory (Richard Jenkins), an amiable old buffer and “backup deputy”, promptly reports it to Sheriff Franklin (newfound Western afficionado Kurt Russell), who brings the drifter in… though not without violence.…

The Lobster is a blackly heartfelt chimera of a romcom

 

You wait for one comedy about men being transformed into animals then two come along at once — a non-mating pair, if you will.

But where Kevin Smith’s Tusk was about a vicious comic forcibly losing his humanity due to a mad experiment, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is altogether more social and universal.…

Room is a minor masterpiece in microcosm with two miraculous performances

 

We take a lot for granted out in the world.

It’s full of space and objects, enough so that we can overlook just how much “thingness” there is to our everyday existence. Imagine a world then of only ten feet by ten feet, a world where every item has a sense of permanency to it: Bed, Wardrobe, Skylight.…

Partisan is a film with allegory issues

 

A grey curve of mountain road. A forested valley overshadowed by dilapidated tower blocks. A dog howls, off.

Nonspecific in its exact time and place, though vaguely Baltic in its devastation, the inhospitable landscape into which Partisan immerses us makes a strong case for any sort of alternative, as offered by Vincent Cassel’s Gregori.…

Black Mass is the parable of Johnny Depp and the Good Acting Choice

 

Everybody loves a good gangster film.

Whether you prefer the shadowy family drama of The Godfather or the stunning expose of Goodfellas, the criminal lifestyle lends itself to a myriad of different portrayals. In the case of Black Mass, it’s the codependent relationship between the Irish-American Mob in South Boston AKA Southie and the FBI.…

The Lady in the Van is a chip (in the sugar) off the old Bennett block

 

For a man widely regarded as Britain’s best-loved living playwright, Alan Bennett sure does have a fixation with old ladies.

It’s a perception Bennett himself laments in The Lady in the Van. He claims he’d much rather be writing about spies.…